Fifty U.S. documents from the early 1960s were declassified by the U.S. National Security Archive on Thursday, shedding light on Israel’s attempts to hide one of its best-kept secrets to this day: details on its nuclear program. The Americans ultimately believed the Israelis were providing “untruthful cover” about intentions to build a bomb.

The documents include papers from the White House, the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission and U.S. intelligence agencies. The editors are Avner Cohen, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and William Burr, the head of nuclear affairs documentation at the National Security Archive, which is based at George Washington University in the capital.

One document provides the minutes of a meeting between U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion on May 30,1961, at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

Cohen and Burr call that meeting a “nuclear conference” – Israel’s nuclear program greatly concerned Kennedy. When he met his predecessor Dwight D. Eisenhower before the changeover of January 20, 1961, he was quick to ask which countries Ike believed were determined to obtain nuclear weapons.

Secretary of State Christian Herter replied: “India and Israel,” before recommending that Kennedy pressure Israel into agreeing to have its nuclear facilities inspected.

According to the details of that meeting, already published in the past, Ben-Gurion told Kennedy that Israel's Dimona project was peaceful. The American transcript says: “Our main – and for the time being only – purpose is [cheap energy]. We do not know what will happen in the future.”

The Israeli transcript says: “For the time being, the only purposes are for peace … but we will see what happens in the Middle East. It does not depend on us.”

In the newly released minutes, the Americans said “Ben-Gurion spoke rapidly and in a low voice so that some words were missed.” Kennedy had a hard time asking concrete questions.

“Ben-Gurion mumbled and spoke very softly. It was hard to hear him and understand what he was saying, partly due to his accent,” Cohen, author of “Israel and the Bomb," told Haaretz.

“It seemed he was leaving in certain ambiguities, consciously or otherwise, so it couldn’t be said he totally lied to the president. As a result, the president couldn’t ask for clarifications, as noted in the minutes. We only discovered this now, with the declassification of the minutes.”

The minutes also reveal that the person taking notes, Assistant Secretary of State Phillips Talbot, thought he heard Ben-Gurion mention a “pilot plant for plutonium separation, which is needed for atomic power.” Talbot also heard Ben-Gurion say this might happen “three or four years later.” He understood the prime minister as saying Israel had no intention to develop nuclear weapons for the time being.

“Ben-Gurion, in what he said and in what he didn’t, was hinting that the nuclear reactor in Dimona could have military potential in the distant future, or at least that is what Talbot believed he heard,” write Cohen and Burr in their explanatory notes to the documents.

Much more plutonium than was known

Ten days before that meeting, another key meeting took place. This was the first visit by American inspectors (as the Americans called them – Israel called them visitors) at the Dimona reactor. The Israelis considered the visit productive. The inspectors believed the facility was under construction and consistent with the Israelis’ description: a research reactor for peaceful purposes.

The complete report on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s visit is part of the new batch of declassified documents. According to the report, people at Dimona told the Americans that the reactor’s output would probably be doubled in the near future.

“This could have served as a warning signal and a worrying indicator that the reactor was capable of producing much more plutonium than was known at the time,” Cohen and Burr say in the explanatory notes. In fact, the visitors returned home satisfied, and their positive report paved the way for the Kennedy-Ben-Gurion meeting.

Another interesting document is the CIA’s National Intelligence Estimate on Israel crafted in October 1961, a few months after the Kennedy-Ben-Gurion meeting. This is the only declassified document published without deletions. It was released a year ago but overlooked by researchers.

“There are some very interesting lines there showing what the U.S. intelligence community really thought about Dimona,” Cohen says.

The document reveals that at the end of 1961, Washington believed that the reactor’s unambiguous purpose was to create an infrastructure for nuclear weapons.

“The Israelis intend at least to put themselves in the position of being able to produce nuclear weapons fairly soon after a decision to do so,” the Americans said. They expected the Israelis to have enough nuclear material for two bombs by 1965 or 1966.

“The significance of this is that the Americans knew that Ben-Gurion was misleading them,” Cohen says. “They couldn’t or wouldn’t directly accuse him of lying. Maybe they didn’t want to disclose what they knew. It’s clear the intelligence community knew that what Ben-Gurion said and what the inspectors saw in Dimona were far from being the whole truth.”

According to the explanatory notes: “The bottom line is that in 1961 the CIA already knew or understood that the way Israel referred to Dimona, whether through Ben-Gurion or through its scientists, was an untruthful cover.”

Along with Ben-Gurion’s silences and fuzzy details, the documents show that the Americans wondered whether the Israelis were deliberately trying to deceive them; for example, during a second visit to the reactor in September 1962.

One document, dated December 27, 1962, wonders about Israel’s unconventional hospitality. Inspectors arrived at the Nahal Soreq reactor for a routine visit in September. The scientific director there was Yuval Ne’eman, later president of Tel Aviv University and science minister for Menachem Begin.

The runaround, Israel-style

The Americans had pressured Israel to allow a second visit to Dimona, Cohen says.

The documents show that Ne’eman decided to take his guests to the Dead Sea. On the way back, as they were passing the Dimona facility, he suggested an unplanned visit.

According to the documents, Ne’eman said he could organize a talk with the facility’s director, and the two inspectors agreed. But it turned out the director wasn’t there, so senior engineers organized a 40-minute tour, much shorter than what was called for by protocol.

Following the tour, the Israelis suggested that the Americans return the following day, but the Americans wondered whether this was a diversion. After all, the Israelis knew the Americans were due to fly home the next day. The next available flight was four days later.

The documents show that the inspectors were puzzled, not knowing whether their visit was part of the inspection or whether they were only day trippers. Either way, the visit was incomplete and did not include visits to all buildings and inspections of all installations.

Ultimately, Israel got what it wanted. The inspectors were duly impressed and their report described Dimona as a reactor for research purposes, not for plutonium production.

Still, CIA officials who later discussed the visit cast doubt on the genuineness of the rapid-fire visit. “They were very uncomfortable with it. It seemed like a trick to them,” Cohen said.

“The documents show that a senior CIA officer said basic intelligence requirements had not been fulfilled and there were inconsistencies between the results of the first and second visits in terms of the use attributed to some of the equipment.”

The documents also show that Washington wanted to impose security surveillance on Prof. Israel Dostrovsky, a guest researcher in the United States at the time. Dostrovsky was a founder of Israel’s nuclear program and later the first head of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, as well as the president of the Weizmann Institute of Science and a 1995 Israel Prize winner.

In 1961, the State Department asked the relevant agencies to keep an eye on Dostrovsky while he was working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. This was seen as a preventive measure designed to protect U.S. nuclear expertise. Dostrovsky died in 2010.

The U.S. National Security Archive’s website contains other U.S. documents on Israel’s nuclear program. One can learn there about the background for the 1969 meeting between President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir, where the ambiguity doctrine was born as a binational policy.

“Despite the official ambiguity policy of Israeli governments, meaning that no factual information about Dimona is ever divulged, there’s abundant historical information on Dimona and the history of Israel’s nuclear program – one of the most studied projects in academic studies on nuclear programs,” Cohen says.

Ofer AderetHaaretz Correspondent

Haaretz Report: US Officials Knew Israel Was Lying About Its Nuclear Program
[Ed. note – John F. Kennedy as well as officials in the CIA knew or had
a strong suspicion that Israel was lying about its nuclear operation at
Dimona. The report below refers to documents that have come to light
providing insight into the extent to which Israeli officials went to
conceal their nuclear bomb program. This includes a tactic used by David
Gurion of deliberately speaking in a thick accent and a barely audible
tone of voice during a meeting when Kennedy confronted him on the issue.
Of all the different forces that have been implicated in the JFK
assassination, which do you suppose had the greatest motive for wanting
to see him dead? Looks like Michael Collins Piper may have been right.]

Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey
April 22, 2016

Newly declassified documents reveal that President John F. Kennedy and his senior aides were deeply concerned in 1961-62 about the nuclear proliferation risks represented by Israel’s nascent nuclear program. A large April 21 document release was co-sponsored by the National Security Archive, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, and the Middlebury Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and edited by Institute professor Avner Cohen and William Burr of the National Security Archive.

Previously
classified meeting notes charting the discussion at a 1961 meeting
between President John F. Kennedy and Israeli Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion were among the documents included in an April 21 release
co-sponsored by the National Security Archive, the Nuclear Proliferation
International History Project, and the Middlebury Institute’s James
Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies.

The released documents include records and notes from a May 1961 meeting between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion in Manhattan. During the meeting, Ben-Gurion “emphasized the peaceful, economic development-oriented nature of the Israeli nuclear project” while also slipping in mention of a “pilot” plant to process plutonium for “atomic power.” He was also quoted as saying that “there is no intention to develop weapons capacity now.”

Whatever Ben-Gurion actually said, neither President Kennedy nor U.S. intelligence officials were fully convinced by Israel’s insistence that Dimona was strictly a peaceful project. A recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Israel prepared several months after that meeting, and published now for the first time, concluded that “Israel may have decided to undertake a nuclear weapons program. At a minimum, we believe it has decided to develop its nuclear facilities in such a way as to put it into a position to develop nuclear weapons promptly should it decide to do so.”

“The significance of this NIE is that the Americans knew or at least recognized that Ben-Gurion was misleading them,” Cohen says. “They couldn’t or wouldn’t directly accuse him of lying. Maybe they didn’t want to disclose what they knew. But it’s clear that the intelligence community understood that what Ben-Gurion said and what the inspectors saw at Dimona were far from being the entire truth.”

Cohen and Burr’s overview of the released documents “reveal that more than any other American president, John F. Kennedy was personally engaged with the problem of Israel’s nuclear program; he may also have been more concerned about it than any of his successors. Of all U.S. leaders in the nuclear age, Kennedy was the nonproliferation president… Kennedy came to office with the conviction that the spread of nuclear weapons would make the world a much more dangerous place.”

Professor Avner Cohen is also a senior fellow with the Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, the largest nongovernmental organization in the United States devoted exclusively to research and training on nonproliferation issues.

Newly
declassified documents reveal how David Ben-Gurion’s mumbles and a trick
sightseeing tour helped Israeli officials pull the wool over Washington’s eyes
on the real purpose of the Dimona reactor.

By Avner
Cohen, William Burr

April 26,
2016

In October
1961, the CIA issued a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Israel, the
first since the discovery of the Dimona reactor less than a year earlier, in
which the CIA’s analysts assessed broadly the rationale and character of the
Israeli nuclear program. For nearly 55 years it was kept secret, until it was
quietly declassified in its entirety last year. It sheds light on what the U.S.
intelligence community thought about the Israeli nuclear project in the first
year of the Kennedy administration, while the Dimona reactor was still under
construction. The CIA judgment was straightforward and unequivocal: Israel was
placing itself in a position to “produce sufficient weapons-grade plutonium for
one or two crude weapons a year by 1965-66, provided separation facilities with
a capacity larger than that of the pilot plant now under construction are
available.” At a minimum, U.S. intelligence knew that the Dimona project was
about weapons capability, not about energy, electricity, or development — as
the Israelis had tried to spin the ongoing project.

The
declassified NIE also sheds light, by implication, on what American
decision-makers, including President John F. Kennedy, must have thought about
what Israeli leaders and top Israeli government officials had told them about
the Dimona project. For example, this NIE makes apparent that Israeli Prime
Minister David Ben-Gurion lied to, or at least misled, Kennedy during a private
conversation with him just three months earlier. It also reveals that what top
Israeli officials at Dimona had told visiting U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC) scientists must have been false. Simply put, the CIA knew, or at least
believed, that Israel was not telling the U.S. government the truth about
Dimona — that the nuclear reactor was intended to develop a weapons capability.

This NIE,
as well as other related documents, many of them never seen by scholars, from
the first two years of the Kennedy administration, were published on April 21
by the National Security Archive, in collaboration with the Nuclear
Proliferation International History Project and the James Martin Center for
Nonproliferation Studies. The collection highlights both the complexity and the
gravity of the Israeli nuclear program for Kennedy and his administration.

The
declassified record reveals that more than any other U.S. president, Kennedy
was more personally engaged with Israel’s nuclear program and more concerned
about it than any of his successors. Israel was the first case of nuclear
proliferation that he had to deal with as a president. And nuclear
proliferation was JFK’s “private nightmare,” as Glenn Seaborg, his Atomic
Energy Commission chairman, once noted. And more than any other country, Israel
was the one that impressed upon Kennedy the complexity and difficulty of the
problem of nuclear proliferation.

Worried
that a nuclear-armed Israel would destabilize the Middle East, Kennedy wanted
to bring his concerns directly to Ben-Gurion. The two leaders met to discuss
the nuclear issue at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York on May 30, 1961. The
meeting was possible thanks to a reassuring report about the first American
visit at Dimona, by AEC scientists, 10 days earlier.

The
documentation about the Waldorf Astoria meeting is interesting because it
includes both the U.S. and Israeli official memoranda of conversations as well
as a U.S. draft memorandum, which was previously unknown. Each has interesting
differences. The U.S. official memorandum of the conversation, declassified and
published in the 1990s, was prepared by Philips Talbot, assistant secretary of
state for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs (and approved — possibly
corrected — by White House Deputy Special Counsel Mike Feldman). The Israeli
minutes, prepared by Ambassador Avraham Harman, were also declassified in the
1990s and historians have made extensive use of them.

In the
Waldorf Astoria meeting, Ben-Gurion provided Kennedy with a rationale and
narrative of the Dimona project that was very similar to what the Israeli hosts
provided to the AEC visitors to Dimona (albeit non-technical and more
political): Namely, that the Dimona project was peaceful in nature; it was
about energy and development. However, unlike during the Dimona visit,
Ben-Gurion’s narrative and rationale left a little wiggle room for a future
reversal. The Israeli transcript makes Ben-Gurion’s caveat pronounced: “For the
time being, the only purposes are for peace. … But we will see what will happen
in the Middle East. It does not depend on us.” The American transcript, by way
of rephrasing Ben-Gurion, reveals a similar caveat as well: “‘Our main — and
for the time being — only purpose is this [cheap energy, etc.],’” the prime
minister said, adding: “‘We do not know what will happen in the future.’ …
Furthermore, commenting on the political and strategic implications of atomic
power and weaponry, the prime minister said he does believe that ‘in 10 or 15
years the Egyptian presumably could achieve it themselves.’”

In his
draft record, Talbot noted (in parenthesis) that during that part of the
conversation, Ben-Gurion spoke “rapidly and in a low voice” in a way that “some
words were missed.” Nevertheless, Talbot thought he had heard Ben-Gurion
referring to a “pilot plant for plutonium separation which is needed for atomic
power,” but that might happen “three or four years later” and that “there is no
intention to develop weapons capacity now.” Ben-Gurion was giving himself a lot
of wiggle room, if Talbot heard him correctly. The draft was declassified long
ago but was buried in obscurity; it needs to be taken into account by scholars.

Days after
the meeting, Talbot sat with Feldman at the White House to “check fine points”
about “sidelines of interest.” A key issue was plutonium, about which
Ben-Gurion “mumbled quickly in a low voice.” Ben-Gurion was understood to say
something to the effect that the issue of plutonium would not arise until the
Dimona installation would be complete in 1964 or so, and that only then would
Israel decide what to do about the processing of plutonium. But that appeared
to be incompatible with what Ben-Gurion had said to then-U.S. Ambassador to
Israel Ogden Reid in January 1961, namely, that the spent fuel would return to
the country that had provided the reactor uranium in the first place — France.
But the U.S.-Israeli affairs desk officer, William R. Crawford, who looked
further into the record, suggested that what Ben-Gurion had said to Reid was
even more equivocal and evasive. Upon close examination, Ben-Gurion might have
meant to hint that Israel was preserving Israel’s freedom of action to produce
plutonium for its own purposes. Kennedy may not have picked up this point, but
then again he, like Talbot, may not have been sure exactly what Ben-Gurion had
said.

The
Ben-Gurion-Kennedy nuclear summit helped clear the air a bit, but the wary view
embodied in the NIE shaped U.S. perceptions of the Dimona project. The Kennedy
administration held to its conviction that it was necessary to monitor Dimona,
not only to resolve American concerns about nuclear proliferation but also to
calm regional anxieties about an Israeli nuclear threat. By mid-1962 the
Kennedy administration believed that a second visit by U.S. scientists was
necessary and, toward that end, started to put diplomatic pressure on Israel.

On Sept.
26, 1962, after “repeated requests over several months,” a second U.S. visit to
Dimona finally took place. Until recently, little was publicly known about that
visit except that then-U.S. Ambassador to Israel Walworth Barbour referred to
it as “unduly restricted to no more than 45 minutes.” According to professor
Yuval Ne’eman, at the time the scientific director of the Soreq nuclear
research center and the host of the American AEC visitors, this short,
deceptive visit was a deliberate “trick” he devised and executed to reduce U.S.
pressure.

Ne’eman
told us a great deal about this 1962 visit years ago, but asked not to cite it
while he was alive. Now, exactly 10 years after his death on April 26, 2006,
with the declassification of U.S. documents, it is time to tell his story.
According to Ne’eman, as the host of the two AEC scientists who had arrived to
inspect the Soreq reactor (under the terms of Atoms for Peace program) he
arranged to take them for a tour of the Dead Sea. This sightseeing, however,
was a well-planned pretext to bring them to Dimona — on Israeli terms. So, on
their way back to Tel Aviv, as they were passing near the Dimona reactor,
Ne’eman “spontaneously” suggested to arrange a quick visit at Dimona to say
hello to the director. The purpose was, of course, to have a much shorter, more
informal, visit than the U.S. government had been pressing for. In doing so,
Israel planned to convince the visitors that Dimona was a research reactor, not
a production reactor. And, of course, when the United States continued to press
for a visit at Dimona, Ne’eman’s plan was to tell them, “But you’ve already
been there.”

A
declassified document in the U.S. archives corroborates Ne’eman’s account of
the second visit. According to a memorandum written in late 1962 by Rodger
Davies, deputy director of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, the whole visit
had been improvised. The two AEC scientists, Thomas Haycock and Ulysses
Staebler, were officially in Israel to inspect the U.S.-supplied “Atoms for
Peace” reactor at Soreq. But on their way back from a tour of the Dead Sea,
their Israeli host (the U.S. document does not mention Ne’eman by name)
observed that they were passing by the Dimona reactor and he offered to
“arrange a call with the director.” It turned out that the director was not
there, but the chief engineers gave them a 40-minute tour of the reactor.

Davies
later wrote that the visit made the AEC scientists feel a little awkward, “not
certain whether they were [there as] guests of their scientist host or on an
inspection.” They did not see the complete installation, nor did they enter all
the buildings they saw, but they believed that what they saw confirmed that
Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor; that, from their point
of view, made the visit “satisfactory.” The Israelis cunningly offered the AEC
the option to come back to the site to complete the visit the next morning, but
because that would have forced a four-day layover Haycock and Staebler declined
the invitation.

Davies
wrote Talbot that the unconventional nature of the visit stirred suspicion
within the relevant intelligence offices in Washington. At least one
interagency meeting convened to discuss the visit’s intelligence value. The
CIA’s “director of Intelligence,” probably a reference to Deputy Director of
Intelligence Ray Cline, was cited to say that while “the immediate objectives
of the visit may have been satisfied, certain basic intelligence requirements
were not.” It was also observed that “there were certain inconsistencies
between the first and second inspection reports insofar as the usages
attributed to some equipment were concerned.” According to Davies, the fact
that the inspectors were invited to visit again the next day seemed to indicate
that “there was no deliberate ‘hanky-panky’ involved on the part of the
Israeli,” but the fact that such a return visit would have caused a major delay
in the team’s departure made the Israeli offer impractical and perhaps
disingenuous.

Whatever
the doubts about the intelligence value, the State Department used the visits’
conclusions to assure interested governments that Dimona was peaceful. A few
weeks after the visit, as the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding, the State
Department began to quietly inform selected governments about its positive
results. U.S. diplomats told Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, during a
briefing on the Cuban situation, that the recent visit confirmed Israeli
statements about the reactor. The British and Canadians were also told similar
things about the “recent brief visit” to Dimona, without explaining what had
made it so short.

The
ambiguities of the second visit and the knowledge that the Dimona reactor would
be an operating reactor in 1963-1964 guaranteed that the issue and the need for
thorough inspections would remain on the Kennedy administration’s agenda. For
Kennedy, U.S. relations with Israel could be in jeopardy if an acceptable
solution to the Dimona problem was not reached. The next stage of the drama —
indeed, the most intense part of it — would come in 1963, when Kennedy sent
ultimatums to Israel and diplomatic conflict turned into a secret showdown.
However, his first two years in office demonstrated that his determination to
prevent an Israeli nuclear weapons program was central to his efforts to avoid
nuclear proliferation.

Atomic Energy Commission Inspectors Gave Dimona a Clean Bill of Health – Twice – after Deliberately Truncated Tours, but U.S. Intelligence Remained Suspicious

International Atomic Energy Agency Inspection of Dimona Was “Our Objective,” According to State Department

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 547
Posted - April 21, 2016
Avner Cohen and William Burr, editors
For more information contact:
Avner Cohen at 202-489-6282 (mobile), 831-647-6437 (office) or avnerc@miis.edu
William Burr at 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu.

Kennedy, Dimona and the Nuclear Proliferation Problem: 1961-1962

by Avner Cohen and William Burr

Washington, D.C., April 21, 2016 - President John F. Kennedy worried that Israel’s nuclear program was a potentially serious proliferation risk and insisted that Israel permit periodic inspections to mitigate the danger, according to declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive, Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Kennedy pressured the government of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to prevent a military nuclear program, particularly after stage-managed tours of the Dimona facility for U.S. government scientists in 1961 and 1962 raised suspicions within U.S. intelligence that Israel might be concealing its underlying nuclear aims. Kennedy’s long-run objective, documents show, was to broaden and institutionalize inspections of Dimona by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

John F. Kennedy was a member of Congress when he first met Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion in 1951. In this photograph taken at Ben-Gurion’s home, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., then a member of Congress from New York, sat between them. (Image from Geopolitiek in Perspectief)

On 30 May 1961, Kennedy met Ben-Gurion in Manhattan to discuss the bilateral relationship and Middle East issues. However, a central (and indeed the first) issue in their meeting was the Israeli nuclear program, about which President Kennedy was most concerned. According to a draft record of their discussion, which has never been cited, and is published here for the first time, Ben-Gurion spoke “rapidly and in a low voice” and “some words were missed.” He emphasized the peaceful, economic development-oriented nature of the Israeli nuclear project. Nevertheless the note taker, Assistant Secretary of State Philips Talbot, believed that he heard Ben-Gurion mention a “pilot” plant to process plutonium for “atomic power” and also say that “there is no intention to develop weapons capacity now.” Ben-Gurion tacitly acknowledged that the Dimona reactor had a military potential, or so Talbot believed he had heard. The final U.S. version of the memcon retained the sentence about plutonium but did not include the language about a “pilot” plant and “weapons capacity.”

The differences between the two versions suggest the difficulty of preparing accurate records of meetings. But whatever Ben-Gurion actually said, President Kennedy was never wholly satisfied with the insistence that Dimona was strictly a peaceful project. Neither were U.S. intelligence professionals. A recently declassified National Intelligence Estimate on Israel prepared several months after the meeting, and published here for the first time, concluded that “Israel may have decided to undertake a nuclear weapons program. At a minimum, we believe it has decided to develop its nuclear facilities in such a way as to put it into a position to develop nuclear weapons promptly should it decide to do so.” This is the only NIE where the discussion of Dimona has been declassified in its entirety.

Declassified documents reveal that more than any other American president, John F. Kennedy was personally engaged with the problem of Israel’s nuclear program; he may also have been more concerned about it than any of his successors. Of all U.S. leaders in the nuclear age, Kennedy was the nonproliferation president. Nuclear proliferation was his “private nightmare,” as Glenn Seaborg, his Atomic Energy Commission chairman, once noted. Kennedy came to office with the conviction that the spread of nuclear weapons would make the world a much more dangerous place; he saw proliferation as the path to a global nuclear war. This concern shaped his outlook on the Cold War even before the 1960 presidential campaign – by then he had already opposed the resumption of nuclear testing largely due to proliferation concerns – and his experience in office, especially the Cuban Missile Crisis, solidified it further.

This Electronic Briefing Book (EBB) is the first of two publications which address the subject of JFK, his administration, and the Israeli nuclear program. It includes about thirty documents produced by the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, and intelligence agencies, some of which highlight the president’s strong personal interest and direct role in moving nonproliferation policy forward during the administration’s first two years. Some of the documents have been only recently declassified, while others were located in archival collections; most are published here for the first time. The compilation begins with President Kennedy’s meeting with departing ambassador to Israel Odgen Reid on January 31, 1961, days after Kennedy took office, and concludes with the State Department’s internal review in late 1962 of the of the second U.S. visit in Dimona.

The documents published today also include:

The Atomic Energy Commission’s recently declassified report on the first official U.S. visit to the Dimona complex, in May 1961. The Ben-Gurion-Kennedy meeting was possible only after that visit produced a positive report on the peaceful, nonmilitary purposes of the reactor. According to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Dimona “was conceived as a means for gaining experience in construction of a nuclear facility which would prepare them for nuclear power in the long run.”

A letter from the State Department to the AEC asking it to place prominent Israeli nuclear scientist Dr. Israel Dostrovsky of the Weizman Institute, who was a visiting researcher at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, under “discreet surveillance” as a “precautionary step” to safeguard U.S. nuclear know-how. The document notes Dostrovsky’s reputation as one of the individuals “primarily responsible for guiding Israel’s atomic energy program.” In 1966 Dostrovsky was appointed by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol as director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, which he reorganized and gave new impetus.

Recently declassified records of U.S.-U.K. meetings during 1962 to discuss the possibilities of putting pressure on Israel to accept inspections of Dimona by the International Atomic Energy Agency. While State Department officials did not believe that pressure would work, they agreed that “IAEA controls should be our objective.” In the meantime, “interim ad hoc inspections” were necessary to satisfy ourselves and the world-at-large as to Israel’s intentions.”

An assessment of the second AEC visit to the Dimona site in September 1962. After weeks of diplomatic pressure by the Kennedy administration for a second visit, two AEC scientists who had inspected the U.S.-supplied Soreq reactor were “spontaneously” invited for a [tk: Bill, 40 or 45 minutes? All other references are to 40.] 45-minute tour to Dimona, while on their way back from an excursion to the Dead Sea. They had no time to see the complete installation, but they left the site with the impression that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor. CIA and State Department officials were skeptical about the circumstances, unable to determine whether the spontaneous invitation was a treat or a trick.

******************

President-elect John F. Kennedy and Secretary of State-designate Dean
Rusk Meet with President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of State
Christian Herter, 19 January 1961. At this meeting Herter warned
Kennedy about the Israeli nuclear problem (Photograph AR6279-D, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library)

More than any other country, it was Israel which most impressed upon President Kennedy the complexity of nuclear proliferation. Israel was the first case with which he had to struggle as president. Only weeks before his inauguration, the outgoing Eisenhower administration quietly discovered and confirmed the secret reactor at Dimona. In mid-December the news leaked out while the Eisenhower administration was pondering a Special National Intelligence Estimate, which asserted that, on the basis of the available evidence “plutonium production for weapons is at least one major purpose of this effort." According to the estimate, if it was widely believed that Israel was acquiring a nuclear weapons capability it would cause “consternation” in the Arab world, with blame going to the U.S. and France for facilitating the project. The United Arab Republic (Egypt/Syria) would “feel the most threatened,” might approach the Soviets for more “countervailing military aid and political backing,” and the Arab world in general might be prompted to take “concrete actions” against Western interests in the region. Moreover, Israel’s “initiative might remove some of the inhibitions to development of nuclear weapons in other Free World countries.”

On January 19, 1961, on the eve of his inauguration, President-elect Kennedy visited the White House – for the last time as a guest – along with his senior team. After 45 minutes of one-on-one conversation with President Eisenhower, the two men walked to the Cabinet Room to join their departing and incoming secretaries of state, defense and treasury to discuss the transition. One of Kennedy’s first questions was about the countries which were most determined to seek the bomb. “Israel and India,” Secretary of State Christian Herter fired back, and added that the newly discovered Dimona reactor, being constructed with aid from France, could be capable of generating 90 kilogram of weapons-grade plutonium by 1963. Herter urged the new president to press hard on inspection in the case of Israel before it introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East.[1]

With his concern about stability in the Middle East and the broader nuclear proliferation threat, Kennedy took Herter’s advice seriously. Within days he met with departing Ambassador Reid for discussions of Dimona and other regional matters. To help him prepare for the meeting, new Secretary of State Dean Rusk provided an updated report about Israel’s nuclear activities and a detailed chronology of the discovery of Dimona. For the rest of Kennedy’s time in office, Dimona would remain an issue of special and personal concern to him and to his close advisers.

The most important event covered in this collection was the “nuclear summit” held at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City on May 30, 1961, between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion. We refer to it as a nuclear summit because Dimona was at the heart of that meeting. The encounter was made possible thanks to a reassuring report about the first American visit to Dimona, which had taken place ten days earlier.

Kennedy had tirelessly pressured Ben-Gurion to allow the visit since taking office, insisting that meeting the request – made initially by the Eisenhower administration after the discovery of Dimona – was a condition for normalizing U.S.-Israeli relations. In a sense, Kennedy turned the question into a de facto ultimatum to Israel. For weeks Ben-Gurion dragged his feet, possibly even manufacturing or at least magnifying a domestic political dispute into a government resignation, primarily as a ploy to stall or delay that Dimona visit.

By April 1961, after a new government had been organized, Israeli Ambassador Avram Harman finally told the administration that Israel had agreed to an American tour of Dimona. On May 20, two AEC scientists, U. M. Staebler and J. W. Croach Jr., visited the nuclear facility on a carefully crafted tour. The visit began with a briefing by a Dimona senior management team, headed by Director-General Manes Pratt, who presented a technological rationale for, and historical narrative of, the project: the Dimona nuclear research center, the Americans were told, was “conceived as a means for gaining experience in construction of a nuclear facility which would prepare them [Israel] for nuclear power in the long run.” In essence, according to Pratt, this was a peaceful project. As the American team’s summary report, which was highlighted in a memorandum to National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, made very clear, the AEC team believed that the Israelis had told them the truth: the scientists were “satisfied that nothing was concealed from them and that the reactor is of the scope and peaceful character previously described to the United States by representatives of the Government of Israel.”

The AEC’s team’s official report (document 8A) is now available for the first time. Previously only draft notes written by the team’s leader had been accessible to researchers. The differences between the two versions are minor except for a noteworthy paragraph in the final report, under the headline “General comment.” That paragraph is important because it reveals that the Israeli hosts told the AEC team that the reactor’s power was likely to double in the future. “It is quite possible that after operating experience has been obtained the power level of the reactor can be increased by a factor of the order of two by certain modifications in design and relaxation of some operating conditions.” The AEC team could have seen that acknowledgement as a red flag, a worrisome indication that the reactor was capable of producing much more plutonium than was then acknowledged. But the team’s one-sentence response was benign: “Design conservatism of this order is understandable for a project of this type,” On the basis of such a positive report, the Waldorf Astoria meeting was able to go ahead.

The Kennedy-Ben-Gurion Meeting

This collection includes both American and Israeli transcripts of the Waldorf Astoria meeting. One of the transcripts is a previously unknown draft of the Kennedy-Ben-Gurion memcon, which has interesting differences with the final version. The U.S. official memorandum of conversation, declassified and published in the 1990s, was prepared by Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs Phillips Talbot (and approved – possibly corrected – by White House Deputy Special Counsel Myer “Mike” Feldman). The Israeli minutes, prepared by Ambassador Avraham Harman, were also declassified in the 1990s and historians have made extensive use of them.[2]

Ben-Gurion provided Kennedy with a rationale and narrative of the Dimona project that was very similar to what the Israeli hosts provided to the AEC team visiting Dimona (albeit in non-technical and more political terms): the Dimona project was peaceful in nature; it was about energy and development. However, unlike during the Dimona visit, Ben-Gurion’s narrative and rationale left a little wiggle room for a future reversal. The prime minister did that by qualifying his peaceful pledge and leaving room for a future change of heart. The Israeli transcript makes Ben-Gurion’s caveat pronounced: “for the time being, the only purposes are for peace. … But we will see what will happen in the Middle East. It does not depend on us” (italics added). The American transcript, by way of rephrasing Ben-Gurion, reveals a similar caveat as well: “Our main – and for the time being – only purpose is this [cheap energy, etc.],” the Prime Minister said, adding that “we do not know what will happen in the future” … Furthermore, commenting on the political and strategic implications of atomic power and weaponry, the Prime Minister said he does believe that “in ten or fifteen years the Egyptian presumably could achieve it themselves” (italics added).

In his draft minutes, Assistant Secretary Talbot notes (in parentheses) that during that part of the conversation, Ben-Gurion spoke “rapidly and in a low voice” so that “some words were missed.” Nevertheless, Talbot thought that he had heard Ben-Gurion making reference to a “pilot plant for plutonium separation which is needed for atomic power,” but that might happen “three or four years later” and that “there is no intention to develop weapons capacity now.” Talbot’s draft was declassified long ago but has been buried in obscurity; it needs to be taken into account by scholars. Notably, the Israeli transcript is even more straightforward in citing Ben-Gurion on the pilot plant issue: “after three or four years we shall have a pilot plant for separation which is needed anyway for a power reactor.”

Days after the meeting, Talbot sat with Feldman at the White House to “check fine points” about “side lines of interest.” There was the key issue of plutonium, about which Ben-Gurion mumbled quickly in a low voice. Ben-Gurion was understood to say something to the effect that the issue of plutonium would not arise until the installation was complete in 1964 or so, and only then could Israel decide what to do about processing it. But this appeared to be incompatible with what the prime minister had said to Ambassador Reid in Tel Aviv in January 1961, namely that the spent fuel would return to the country which provided the uranium in the first place (France). But Israeli affairs desk officer, William R. Crawford, who looked further into the record, suggested that what Ben-Gurion had said was more equivocal and evasive. Upon close examination, Ben-Gurion might have meant to hint in passing that Israel was preserving its freedom of action to produce plutonium for its own purposes. Kennedy may not have picked up on this point, but he, like Talbot, may not have been sure exactly what Ben-Gurion had said.

Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs G. Lewis Jones, an Eisenhower administration hold-over, was on the receiving end of President Kennedy’s telephone calls asking for updates on the requests for a visit by U.S. scientists to Israel’s Dimona complex. (National Archives, Still Pictures Branch, 59-S0, box 20)

Intelligence Estimate

The most intriguing – and novel – document in this collection is National Intelligence Estimate 35-61 (document #11a), under the headline “Outlook on Israel,” which was declassified only in February 2015. This NIE left no doubt that the AEC scientists’ impressions from their visit to Dimona had no impact on the way which the intelligence community made its own determination on Dimona’s overall purpose. While the visit clearly helped to ease the political and diplomatic tensions between the United States and Israel over Dimona, and removed, at least temporarily, the nuclear issue as a problem from the bilateral agenda, it did not change the opinion of U.S. intelligence professionals. In their view, while acknowledging the Israeli official narrative of Dimona as peaceful, it was truly about weapons capability. The Dimona complex provided Israel with the experience and resources “to develop a plutonium production capability.” NIE 35-61 reminded its readers that France had supplied “plans, material, equipment and technical assistance to the Israelis.”

Significantly, the intelligence community estimated in 1961 that Israel would be in a position to “produce sufficient weapons grade plutonium for one or two crude weapons a year by 1965-66, provided separation facilities with a capacity larger than that of the pilot plant now under construction are available.” In retrospect, in all these respects, NIE 35-61 was accurate in its assessments and predictions, although no one on the U.S. side knew for sure when Israel would possess the requisite reprocessing facilities. The language about “separation facilities” raises important questions. If Israel was to produce nuclear weapons it would require technology to reprocess spent fuel into plutonium. Whether and when U.S. intelligence knew that Israel had begun work on a secret, dedicated separation plant – larger than a pilot plant – at the Dimona complex has yet to be disclosed. But if the CIA knew about such plans, it may have meant that key information was concealed from AEC scientists who visited Dimona (or perhaps they were instructed to locate such facilities).[3]

Probably lacking secret knowledge of internal Israeli government thinking, the authors of NIE 35-61 may not have fully understood the depth of Israel’s nuclear resolve, or at least, the modus operandi by which Israel proceeded with its nuclear project. They could not be fully clear – both conceptually and factually – on the nature of the Israeli nuclear commitment, i.e., whether Dimona was a dedicated weapons program from the very start, or, alternatively, whether it was set up as infrastructure leading to a weapons capability upon a later decision. At a minimum, however, the authors of NIE 35-61 believed “that the Israelis intend at least to put themselves in the position of being able to produce nuclear weapons fairly soon after a decision to do so.”

Notwithstanding the lack of clarity, the NIE’s findings were incompatible with what Ben-Gurion told Kennedy about the overall purpose of the Dimona project as well as with what he said about Dimona’s plutonium production capacity. Similarly, the NIE was inconsistent with the AEC report whose writers accepted the Israeli narrative and rationale. The bottom line was that as early as 1961 the CIA already knew – or at least suspected – that the Israeli official account of the Dimona project – either by the prime minister or by Israeli scientists – was a cover story and deceptive by nature.

The Second Visit

The AEC visit and the Ben-Gurion Kennedy meeting helped clear the air a bit, but the wary view embodied in the NIE shaped U.S. perceptions of the Dimona project. The Kennedy administration held to its conviction that it was necessary to monitor Dimona, not only to resolve American concerns about nuclear proliferation but also to calm regional anxieties about an Israeli nuclear threat. In this context, the United States did not want to continue to be the only country that guaranteed the peaceful nature of Dimona to the Arab countries. Hence, during the months after the meetings, State Department officials tried to follow up President Kennedy’s interest in having scientists from “neutral” nations, such as Sweden, visit the Dimona plant. The British also favored such ideas but they sought U.S. pressure to induce the Israelis to accept inspection visits by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The Kennedy administration believed that IAEA inspections of Dimona were a valid long-term goal but recognized that a second visit by U.S. scientists was necessary if a visit by neutrals could not be arranged.

The talks with the Swedes did not pan out; by June 1962, the Kennedy administration decided to “undertake the responsibility once more.” On 26 September 1962, after “repeated requests over several months,” a second American visit to Dimona finally took place. Until recently little was known about that visit except that Ambassador Walworth Barbour referred to it as “unduly restricted to no more than forty five minutes.”[4] Also, the late professor Yuval Ne’eman, at the time serving as the scientific director of the Soreq nuclear research center and the official host of the American AEC visitors, was cited in Israel and the Bomb to the effect that the visit was a deliberate “trick” (the word “trick” was used but was not cited in the book) he devised and executed to ease American pressure for a second formal visit in Dimona.[5]

This collection includes archival material that sheds light on the second visit. The key document is a memo, written on 27 December 1962, by deputy director of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs Rodger Davies to Assistant Secretary Talbot on the September visit. It was hiding in plain sight in a microfilm supplement to the State Department historical series, Foreign Relations of the United States. The memo narrated the improvised circumstances of the visit which fit well with the way Ne’eman told the story in the late 1990s. As the two AEC scientists who had arrived to inspect the small reactor at Soreq – Thomas Haycock and Ulysses Staebler – were being driven back from their Dead Sea tour, Ne’eman noted that they were passing by the Dimona reactor and that he could spontaneously “arrange a call with the director.” Notably, Staebler was among the two AEC scientists who had visited Dimona in May 1961, so he must have met director Pratt. It turned out that the director was not there, but the chief engineers gave them a 40-minute tour of the reactor.

Phillips Talbot, who succeeded Jones as Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, and as a note-taker at the Kennedy/Ben-Gurion meeting had to make sense of the Prime Minister’s rapid and “low” voice. (National Archives, Still Picture Branch, 59-SO, box 41)

The 27 December document reveals that the circumstances of that tour made the AEC visitors feel a little awkward, “not certain whether they were guests of their scientist-host or on an inspection.” They did not see the complete installation, nor did they enter all the buildings they saw, but they believed that what they saw confirmed that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor; and that, from their point of view, made the visit worthwhile and “satisfactory.” The memo also notes that the AEC scientists were presented with the option to come back to the site to complete the visit the next morning, but because that would have forced a four-day layover they declined the offer.
According to Rodger Davies, the highly unconventional nature of the visit stirred suspicion within the relevant intelligence offices in Washington. During one interagency meeting to discuss the visit’s intelligence value, the CIA’s “Director of Intelligence,” probably a reference to Deputy Director of Intelligence Ray Cline, was quoted as saying that “the immediate objectives of the visit may have been satisfied, [but] certain basic intelligence requirements were not.” It was also observed that “there were certain inconsistencies between the first and second inspection reports insofar as the usages attributed to some equipment were concerned.” The fact that the inspectors were invited to visit again the next day seemed to indicate that “there was no deliberate ’hanky-panky’ involved on the part of the [ Israelis,” but the fact that such a return visit would have caused a major delay in the team’s departure flight made the Israeli offer impractical and perhaps disingenuous.
Whatever the doubts about the intelligence value, the State Department deployed the visits’ conclusions to assure interested countries that Dimona was peaceful. A few weeks afterwards, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding, the State Department began to quietly inform selected governments about its positive results. U.S. diplomats told Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, during a briefing on the Cuban situation, that the recent visit confirmed Israeli statements about the reactor. The British and Canadians were also told similar things about the “recent brief visit” to Dimona, without explaining what had made it so short. By the end of October, the Department had sent a fuller statement to various embassies.
Davies’ memorandum cites a formal report, dated October 12, 1962, prepared by the AEC team about their visit. But the report was not attached to the memorandum found in State Department files. Unfortunately, except for the 1961 visit report, the Department of Energy has been unable to locate the 1962 report or other such reports from the following years.

THE DOCUMENTS

Documents 1A-B: Briefing President Kennedy

Document 1A: Secretary of State Rusk to President Kennedy, “Your Appointment with Ogden R. Reid, Recently Ambassador to Israel,” 30 January 1961, with memorandum and chronology attached, Secret, Excised copy

Document 1B: Memorandum of Conversation, “Ambassador Reid's Review of His Conversation with President Kennedy,” 31 January 1961, Secret

Source: National Archives College Park, Record Group 59, records of the Department of State (hereinafter RG 59), Bureau of Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Office of Near Eastern Affairs (NESA/NEA). Records of the Director, 1960-1963, box 5, Tel Aviv - 1961

On 31 January 1961, only days after his inauguration, President Kennedy met with Ogden Reid, who had just resigned as U.S. ambassador to Israel, for a comprehensive briefing on U.S.-Israel relations, including the problem of the Dimona nuclear reactor (an issue in which the new president had a “special interest”). To help prepare the president for the meeting, Secretary of State Dean Rusk signed off on a briefing paper, which contained also a detailed chronology of the discovery of the Dimona reactor, and which reviewed the problems raised by the secret atomic project as well as U.S. interest in sending scientists there to determine whether there was a proliferation risk.

In their 45-minute meeting, Ambassador Reid told President Kennedy that he believed the U.S “can accept at face value Ben-Gurion’s assurance that the reactor is to be devoted to peaceful purposes” and that a visit to Dimona by a qualified American scientist could be arranged, “if it is done on a secret basis.”

Document 2A-E: Pressing for a Visit

Document 2A: Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs to Secretary of State, “President’s Suggestion re Israeli Reactor,” 2 February 1961, Secret

Concerned about a recent visit to Cairo by Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir Semenov and the possibility that the Soviets might exploit Egyptian concerns over Dimona, President Kennedy pressed State to arrange an inspection visit at Dimona by a U.S. scientist. Assistant Secretary of State G. Lewis Jones soon met with Israeli Ambassador Harman, who explained that the Israeli government was preoccupied with an ongoing domestic political crisis. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion announced his resignation and his intention to take a four-week vacation while still being head of a “caretaker government.” Moreover, Ambassador Harman could not understand why Washington had not simply accepted Ben-Gurion’s assurances about Dimona. Jones responded that suspicions remained and that as a “close friend,” Israel needed to help allay them.

After informing Kennedy about the Harman-Jones conversation, Secretary of State Rusk had his own meeting with Harman, where he also raised the desirability of a visit, noting that Israeli “candor” was important to the state of the U.S.-Israeli relationship. During that conversation as well as another with national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, Harman disparaged Dimona’s importance, arguing that its existence had leaked out “unnecessarily.” But Bundy emphasized “legitimate” Arab concern about the Israeli nuclear project. It is interesting to note that in internal American documents the reference is always to an “inspection,” but when the issue was discussed with Israeli diplomats, U.S. officials avoided raising their hackles by always referring to a “visit.”

Documents 3A-F: Raising Pressure for an Invitation

Document 3A: U.S. Mission to the United Nations (New York) telegram number 2242 to Department of State, “Eyes Only” from Reid to Secretary, 20 February 1961, Secret

Document 3F: Memorandum from Secretary Rusk to President Kennedy, “Dimona Reactor in Israel,” 30 March 1961, with “History of United States Interest in Israel’s Atomic Energy Activities,” attached, Secret

It took many more weeks of back-and-forth American-Israeli exchanges after departing Ambassador Reid told President Kennedy that an American inspection could be arranged. While visiting the United States for fund raising purposes, Ben-Gurion’s chief of staff (and future mayor of Jerusalem) Theodore “Teddy” Kollek met with Ogden Reid in New York and with Assistant Secretary Jones in Washington. He told Reid that Ben-Gurion would accept a visit to Dimona once a new government had been formed in six to eight weeks. Kollek told Jones that a visit “during March” was possible and personally agreed that it would allay suspicions if Dimona was under the control of the Weizmann Institute instead of the Defense Ministry.

The news about a possible March visit went to President Kennedy, but on 13 March Ambassador Harman had nothing to report, claiming that the Israeli government was still preoccupied with domestic politics. At month’s end, Kennedy intervened, apparently calling Jones directly for information about the status of the U.S. request. Following up, Jones called in Ambassador Harman for an update, noting Kennedy’s keen interest in the matter and the importance of Israel removing any “shadow of doubt” about the purpose of Dimona. Harman had no news but believed that nothing would be resolved until Passover ended on 10 April. A chronology that Rusk attached to his memo to Kennedy indicated that the State Department had been asking about the visit at “approximately weekly intervals.”

By early April, Ben-Gurion realized he no longer could postpone the American visit to Dimona. His diary revealed that he was persuaded by White House special counsel Myer “Mike” Feldman, and Kennedy political ally Abraham Feinberg, who was involved in fund raising for Dimona, that a meeting between him and Kennedy, in return for an American visit at Dimona, could save the nuclear project. On 10 April, Ambassador Harman finally told Jones and Philip Farley, the special assistant to the secretary of state for atomic energy and outer space matters, that Israel was formally inviting a U.S. scientist to visit the Dimona complex during the week of 15 May, but that the visit should be secret. Jones and Farley agreed that the visit should not be publicized but worried that secrecy could be “counter-productive.” As Jones explained to Rusk the next day, “It seems to us to defeat the objective of establishing that the reactor is a normal civilian atomic project if extreme measures of secrecy are taken in connection with the visit.” Jones also informed Rusk that the Atomic Energy Commission had selected two of its scientists to make the visit: Ulysses Staebler, assistant director of reactor development and chief of the Civilian Power Reactors Branch, and Jesse Croach Jr., a heavy water reactor expert with Dupont, the AEC’s principal contractor for heavy water reactor work.

Jones wrote a briefing paper to help Rusk prepare to speak with Harman about the Dimona invitation, but the only record of their meeting that has surfaced publicly is the part of the conversation concerning Ben-Gurion’s request for a meeting with President Kennedy, possibly as early as the week of April 23. Rusk responded that he would pass on the request to the president but expressed his doubts as the president’s schedule was already full until the first week of June.

Israel kept pushing the necessity for secrecy, but Washington insisted that a “quiet visit” was enough to keep Croach and Staebler out of the spotlight. Moreover, the Kennedy administration wanted to be able to inform allies, such as the British, about the visit’s findings. While the Israelis wanted Washington to agree to push the visit back until after the Ben-Gurion-Kennedy meeting, the State Department, under instructions from the White House, refused to change the schedule: the administration wanted the visit to occur before Kennedy met with Ben-Gurion, so that the findings could be fully assessed. The State Department was determined to meet that goal, as was evident from the preparations for a meeting with the inspectors.

The second-ranking diplomat at the Israeli Embassy, Mordechai Gazit, raised questions to Phillip Farley about the real purposes of the U.S. visit to Dimona. Justifying the secrecy as protection for suppliers against the Arab boycott of Israel, Gazit argued that it would be years before the reactor could have any military potential and, in any event, Israel needed whatever “means it could find” to defend itself. Taking in Gazit’s implicit admission, Farley noted that Washington was concerned about the impact that an Israeli nuclear project aimed at weapons could have on the region and that an Israeli nuclear weapons program would be disastrous for world stability. “I could not see how Israel could long expect to have nuclear weapons without its enemies also getting them in some way. Once there, were nuclear weapons on both sides, I thought Israel would be in a desperate state.” Its territory was simply too small for it to survive even a small exchange.” Farley’s argument reflects the fundamental Israeli nuclear dilemma to this day.

Memorandum, by L.D. Battle, Executive Secretary, to McGeorge Bundy, Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, “American Scientists’ Visit to Israel’s Dimona Reactor,” 18 May 1961, Secret

Source: RG 59, DF, 884A.1901/5-1861

President Kennedy told the new U.S. ambassador to Israel, Walworth Barbour, that he was concerned about Israel’s insistence on a secret visit as well as the “absence of a ‘neutral’ scientist” in the visit to Dimona. Addressing Kennedy’s concerns, the State Department took the position that it was better to put up with Ben-Gurion’s “sensitivities” about secrecy than “have no visit” at all. Nevertheless, the Department advised the White House that “complete and continued secrecy as to the results of the visit would [not] be possible.” The results of the visit would be conveyed to appropriate U.S. agencies “in due course” and would be shared perhaps with some “friendly” governments. Moreover, the U.S. believed that once the Israelis became used to visits to Dimona it might be possible to persuade them to accept visits by scientists from other countries or a publicized inspection by the IAEA.

During their visit to Israel (May 17-May 22), AEC scientists Croach and Staebler visited the Weizman Institute, the Technion, the USAEC-funded swimming pool experimental reactor at Soreq, and finally the Dimona complex then under construction. It was in that first visit that Israel provided its “cover” story for the Dimona project, a narrative of “plausible deniability” that would be observed during all future visits.[6] When Croach and Staebler met with State Department officials on their return, they said that they were “satisfied” that the reactor was “of the scope and peaceful character” claimed by Israeli officials. That could only be a tentative judgment because Dimona was still an unfinished project. Although Croach and Staebler found no evidence that the Israelis had nuclear weapons production in mind, they acknowledged that “the reactor eventually will produce small quantities of plutonium suitable for weapons.” Their official report to the AEC was far more circumspect, not mentioning the weapons potential or a capability to produce plutonium. Nevertheless, as noted earlier, they mentioned the Israeli statement about the possibility that the reactor’s power could be doubled in the future, which would increase the potential to produce plutonium.

Document 9B: Memorandum of Conversation, “President Kennedy, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, Ambassador Avraham Harman of Israel, Myer Feldman of the White House Staff, and Philips Talbot, Assistant Secretary, Near East and South Asian Affairs, at the Waldorf Astoria, New York, 4:45 p.m. to 6:15 p.m.,” 30 May 1961, Secret, Draft

Document 9C: Ambassador Harman’s Record of the Meeting, with attachment on the “Atomic Reactor” (and transcript), sent with cover letter by Mordechai Gazit to Israeli Foreign Ministry, 7 June 1961

Document 9D: Memorandum by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs Armin H. Meyer of White House discussion on Ben-Gurion/Kennedy Meeting, n.d. [circa 9 June 1961], Secret

On his way to the Vienna summit with Nikita Khrushchev, Kennedy stopped in Manhattan to meet with Ben-Gurion.[7] For both leaders, the Dimona question was a top priority; just as Kennedy wanted Israel to “remove any doubts” that other countries had about its purposes, so Ben-Gurion wanted to resolve this outstanding problem and to let the project be finished quietly. Ben-Gurion stood by his earlier statements that the “main” purpose of the reactor was peaceful – namely, internal economic development. Given Kennedy’s interest in regional stability and aversion to nuclear proliferation, he wanted to be able to let Israel’s Arab neighbors know about the positive results of the recent Dimona visit by American scientists.

The official U.S. memorandum of conversation is published in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States (the file copy at the National Archives is classified even though the FRUS volume has been published), and an Israeli English-language version is also available. As noted earlier, a draft of the official memcon has surfaced which has some interesting differences with the final versions: for example, Ben-Gurion’s tacit acknowledgement of a nuclear weapons potential and a statement suggesting freedom of action about eventual reprocessing. The Israeli minutes of the conversation manifest Ben-Gurion’s ambiguities and evasiveness even more strongly, for example, his assertion that “for the time being, the only purposes of [the Dimona reactor] are for peace.” Moreover, he said, “we will see what happens in the Middle East.”

Documents 10A-C: Sharing the Findings

Document 10A: State Department telegram 5701 to U.S. Embassy United Kingdom, 31 May 1961, Secret

When Kennedy said that he would like to share the findings of the Dimona visit with other governments, Ben-Gurion did not object to that or the possibility of visits by “neutral” scientists. The British had already asked for information on the Kennedy-Ben-Gurion meeting and one day later, their embassy was given the gist of the Dimona visit report as well as a brief description of the meeting. The State Department made plans to brief Arab governments, but Deputy Assistant Secretary Armin Meyer asked Ambassador Harman if his government would be willing to work with U.S. representatives at the IAEA Board of Governors meeting to make an announcement of the visit to Dimona and also to undertake quiet discussions at the meeting about a possible neutral visit to Dimona. Harman, however, objected to an IAEA role in the Dimona matter until the rest of the world had accepted the idea of inspections and he wanted Washington to coordinate any visit by neutral scientists.

The State Department had already sent a message to Egyptian Foreign Minister Fawzi about the visit and soon sent a circular telegram to embassies in the region, but also to Oslo (Norway was interested because of its heavy water sales to Israel). Through those messages the “highest levels” of those governments were to be informed that the U.S. scientists had “found no evidence” of Israeli preparations for producing nuclear weapons.

The State Department’s assurances notwithstanding, within U.S. intelligence circles doubts lingered. In a National Intelligence Estimate on Israel, declassified in 2015 at the request of the National Security Archive, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that:

Israel may have decided to undertake a nuclear weapons program. At a minimum, we believe it has decided to develop its nuclear facilities in such a way as to put it into a position to develop nuclear weapons promptly should it decide to do.

Moreover, if the Israeli had made such a decision, by 1965-1966, the Dimona reactor would produce enough plutonium to build one or two nuclear weapons a year, although to do that they would need larger processing capabilities than the pilot plant then in the works. Other obstacles were the lack of testing facilities and the problem that a test would use up scarce fissile material supplies. Another obstacle, cited by State Department atomic energy adviser Philip Farley in a letter to an AEC official, was a lack of weapons design information. In light of that concern, Farley advised the AEC to be “alert” to the possibility that Israeli scientists might try to acquire nuclear weapons design information “through clandestine means in the United States.” Thus, “discreet surveillance” was necessary of Dr. Israel Dostrovsky, an eminent Israeli chemist, who had recently been given a teaching fellowship at Brookhaven National Laboratory. An expert on isotopes and isotope separation, Dostrovsky was a key figure in Israel’s nuclear-scientific establishment, later becoming the director general of the Atomic Energy Commission (1966-1970). That Dotrovsky had close ties to the Israeli defense establishment may have influenced the notion that he should be a target for surveillance.[8]

The Kennedy administration had to balance its apprehensions over Dimona with other concerns, such as the broader implications of the status of Palestinian refugees. With respect to Dimona, the State Department kept in mind President Kennedy’s interest in visits by neutral scientists and Ben-Gurion’s approval of such. Moreover, State Department officials believed that a neutral visit could “obviate any overtones of inspections, which is [sic] unacceptable to Israel,” and also make it possible for Washington to avoid being the sole “guarantor of Israel’s nuclear intentions” on the basis of the May 1961 visit by AEC scientists. During a meeting with Ambassador Harman, Phillips Talbot brought up again the idea of neutral visits and mentioned that Farley had some suggestions to make. Harman said that he would be happy to meet with Farley but that Israel would “prefer a visit by Scandinavian or Swiss scientists.”

Document 13: Memorandum by Robert Amory, Deputy Director of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, to Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs [McGeorge Bundy], 18 January 1962, Secret, excised copy

That the Central Intelligence Agency has kept secret important findings about the Dimona project is evident from this heavily excised report to McGeorge Bundy, which has been under appeal since 2010. Whatever the findings were, they were enough to induce Bundy to ask his aide, Robert Komer, to “prod” the State Department to arrange “another periodic check on this by scientists.” That, however, would take time.

Among other records, the CIA has also withheld in its entirety a scientific intelligence report, from early 1962, on the Israeli nuclear program; it is currently under appeal with the Interagency Security Classification Appeals panel.

Documents 14A-D: Whether the IAEA Could Be Brought In

Document 14A: Nicolas G. Thacher to James P. Grant, “Your Appointment with Dennis Greenhill and Dennis Speares of the British Embassy,” 12 February 1962, Secret

Worried about the possibility of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, especially in light of Egyptian talks with West Germany about the acquisition of a reactor, the British wanted to find ways to meet Arab concerns about Dimona by bringing the site under scrutiny of the emerging IAEA safeguards/inspection system. The British recognized that achieving this would be very difficult – the Israelis objected to IAEA inspection because they professed to be worried about the inclusion of Soviet bloc officials on the inspection teams; moreover, the French, who had supplied the reactor and fuel elements, were also unlikely to accept international inspection of the irradiated fuel. Nevertheless, because Dimona was not yet an operating reactor (and the IAEA Safeguards Division was still being created), the British suggested preliminary, ad hoc steps, such as inspection by a “neutral” (in terms of the Arab-Israeli dispute) observer such as Canada. They believed that because of Israel’s reluctance, U.S. “pressure” would be required.

The State Department concurred with the objective of the British proposal: “we fully agree on the desirability of bringing Near East nuclear development under IAEA control.” Nevertheless, believing that Israeli and French objections were not likely to yield to “pressure,” State Department officials also favored pursuing such steps as visits by “neutral” scientists.. They believed, however, that Canada was not neutral enough because it was so closely associated with the IAEA; nor was Ottawa likely to get any more information than Washington could. Washington had been holding talks with the Swedes, but if they did not pan out, the U.S. could arrange a second visit by its scientists.

No documents about U.S. efforts to find a “neutral” visitor have surfaced so far, but apparently the Swedes expressed only “faint interest” in playing a role, which led Washington to decide to “undertake the responsibility once more.” As it had been over a year since the first visit, U.S. diplomats believed that if the Israelis agreed to another one it would provide an opportunity for Washington to preserve a “favorable atmosphere” in the region by making assurances about the reactor to Cairo and other Arab capitals (as long as the assurances were warranted). On 22 June, Talbot renewed the question with Ambassador Harman but the lack of response led Talbot to bring up the matter on 14 September. By then two AEC scientists were scheduled to visit the U.S.-financed reactor at Soreq in a matter of days and it made sense for them to include a visit to Dimona. Harman, however, said that no decision could be made until later in the month when Ben-Gurion was back from a European trip.

Never making a formal reply to the U.S. request, the Israelis used the ploy of an improvised visit to evade the substance of a real visit. As noted in the introduction, decades later an Israeli source confirmed to Avner Cohen that this was indeed a trick. While the two AEC scientists, Thomas Haycock and Ulysses Staebler, did not see the complete installation, they believed that they had enough time to determine that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor, which, from their point of view, made the visit “satisfactory.” U.S. intelligence did not agree because the visit left unanswered questions, such as “whether in fact the reactor might give Israel a nuclear weapons capability.”

A few weeks after the visit, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding, the State Department began to inform selected governments about its results. U.S. diplomats told Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, during a briefing on the Cuban situation, that the visit confirmed Israeli statements about the reactor. The British and Canadians were also told about the “recent brief visit” to Dimona, without explaining what had made it so short. By the end of October, the Department sent a fuller statement to embassies in the Middle East, as well as London, Paris, Ottawa, and Oslo.

[3]. In conversations Avner Cohen had with the late John Hadden, the CIA station chief in Israel during 1964-68, he made it apparent that his office was fully clear about “what was Dimona doing,” including reprocessing, and was not allowed to maintain any contact with the visiting AEC scientists. See also Israel and the Bomb 187-90.

[5]. Yuval Ne’eman told Avner Cohen about his “trick” on the visit of 1962 in many of the conversations during the 1990s and 2000s. When Cohen published Israel and the Bomb in 1998 he cited only a condensed version of Ne’eman tale—Ne’eman still considered it sensitive in the 1990s. Now, almost ten years after his passing (2006), Cohen is comfortable citing his tale in more detail.

According to Ne’eman in an interview conducted in March 1994, as the host of the two AEC scientists who had arrived to inspect the Soreq reactor (under the terms of the “Atoms for Peace” program) he “arranged” to take them for a tour of the Dead Sea. This was a well-planned pretext to bring them to Dimona on Israeli terms. So, on their way back, by late afternoon, as they were passing near the Dimona reactor, Ne’eman “spontaneously” suggested to arrange a quick visit at Dimona to say “hello” to the director whom inspector Staebler had known from the visit a year earlier, in May 1961. Ne’eman told them this was a great opportunity since their government was pressing for such a visit. The purpose was, of course, to have a much more informal and abbreviated visit rather than the formal one the US government wanted. In doing so, Israel would ease American pressure and convince the visitors that Dimona was a research reactor, not a production reactor. When the United States continued to press for a visit, Ne’eman told them, “you just did it.”

[6]. For more information on the visit, see Cohen, Israel and the Bomb, 105-108.

RAPPEL : The Kennedys vs Israel’s Lobby
Editor’s note: PULSE is delighted to welcome Grant F. Smith, director
of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP) and author
of many books, including America’s Defense Line, as our new feature
contributor. In his first post Grant reveals the emerging details of the
secret battles between the Kennedys and the Israel lobby.

Op-Ed: Netanyahu is not the first leader the White House found "frustrating" There is no friendship without disagreements and there have been plenty of those in Israel's history of relations with the USA. (...)Ironically, many of the Israeli leaders with whom past U.S. presidents have clashed were from the leftwing Labor Party, not the rightwing Likud. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was the first Israeli leader to find himself at odds with Washington.(...)President John F. Kennedy, for his part, was frustrated by Ben-Gurion's refusal to acknowledge that Israel was developing nuclear weapons. Meeting in New York City in May 1961, JFK pressed the Israeli leader for details on what was taking place at the Dimona nuclear research facility. "Ben-Gurion mumbled and spoke very softly; it was hard to hear him and understand what he was saying, partly due to his accent," according to Prof. Avner Cohen, author of Israel and the Bomb. Recently-declassified National Security Archive documents show that U.S. inspectors who were given a partial tour of the Dimona facility in 1962 felt they were being "tricked" and "misled" because they were shown only some of the buildings.

In March 1992, Representative Paul Findley of Illinois, wrote in the
Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs, “It is interesting. . . .
to notice that in all the words written and uttered about the Kennedy
assassination, Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned.” Two years later in his bookFinal Judgment,author Michael Collins Piper actuallyaccused Israel of the crime. Of all the conspiracy theories, it remains one of the most intriguing.

What is indisputable is that, although it was kept out of the eye of
both the Press and the Public, a bitter dispute had developped between
Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion who believed that his nation's
survival depended on it attaining nuclear capability and Kennedy who was
vehemently opposed to it. In May 1963, Kennedy wrote to Ben-Gurion
explaining why he was convinced that Israel's pursuit of nuclear weapons
capability was a serious threat to world peace.

Il va même plus loin en conférence:

I'll
tell you one thing: I found articles -- not tripped in publications but
in very sophisticated publications -- saying, "Forget Lyndon Johnson,
forget the CIA, forget Fidel Castro! MOSSAD killed JFK because they
were upset by what he had done to Ben-Gurion." So you see, we drop a few
bombs like this in this book, unproven ...(Historian Martin W. Sandler, Author of The Letters of John F. Kennedy, lecture at the JFK Museum; Nov 16, 2013, CSPAN2 | BookTV @51 min : 21 sec)